Your Right to Know

WASHINGTON — Syria’s chemical weapons could be used at “a moment’s notice” and the international
community should not accept any assurances from Syrian officials that they will not be used, House
Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers said yesterday.

U.S. and other Western officials recently issued sharp warnings to Syrian President Bashar Assad
not to deploy chemical weapons. Syria called those warnings a “pretext for intervention” in the
civil war.

Rogers, a Michigan Republican, said the Syrian government’s activities related to chemical
weapons were a shift in posture and a major concern.

“I believe that they have put elements of their chemical-weapons program in a condition of which
they could be used at a moment’s notice, which is very different from before,” Rogers said.

“And some notion that they have promised not to use them, I don’t think the international
community … should take that on face value,” he said.

“This is a regime that’s getting more desperate by the day. They have affirmatively put elements
of their chemical-weapon program in a position for use; that is something that we should all be
concerned about.”

His comments came amid reports yesterday that Assad’s forces had fired Soviet-era Scud ballistic
missiles against rebels in a significant escalation of the nearly 2-year-old conflict that already
has killed more than 40,000 civilians.One official said there was no indication that chemical
weapons were aboard the missiles. This official estimated that the number of Scuds fired was more
than half a dozen, confirming details first reported by
The New York Times. Also yesterday, three bombs collapsed walls in the Syrian Interior
Ministry building in Damascus, killing at least five people, as rebels edged closer to the capital.
At least 23 others were injured in the attacks.There was no immediate claim of responsibility for
the blasts.
Information from the Associated Press was included in this story.